The Innovate Interview: MBF Bioscience pushes edge of innovation

Next up: BPS, a global positioning system for neuroscientists navigating inside the brain

May 30, 2013

Susan Tappan, staff scientist at MBF Bioscience (left), and Jack Glaser, president and co-founder, look through Biolucida, a program that examines a montage of microscopic images of the brain and other organs. MBF was recently recognized by the White House and the U.S. Small Business Administration for the innovations coming out of its research and development program and for creating jobs. / MADDIE MCGARVEY/FREE PRESS

Written by

Dan D’Ambrosio

Free Press Staff Writer

Jack Glaser, president of MBF BioScience, looks through Biolucida, a program that examines a montage of microscopic images of the brain and other organs. / MADDIE MCGARVEY/FREE PRESS

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WILLISTON — Jack Glaser of MBF Bioscience in Williston was in rarefied company earlier this month as he sat in the White House, waiting to receive a Tibbetts Award from Karen Mills, administrator of the U.S. Small Business Administration.

One of the pioneers of laser eye surgery was sitting next to him, Glaser said, along with a founder of Biogen-Idec, a $10 billion pharmaceutical company that began as a small startup.

The award Glaser was receiving was named after Roland Tibbetts, who launched the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program at the National Science Foundation in the mid-1970s. Tibbetts retired from the foundation in 1996, but, Glaser said, Tibbetts, whom he met at the awards presentation, is “very sharp” at 89 years old.

The initiative Tibbetts began at the National Science Foundation turned into a wide-ranging program administered by the SBA, directing 1 percent of all government research and development funding into small businesses. Tibbetts recognized that small companies are the innovators, Glaser said. The federal funding amounts to billions of dollars, going to some 15,000 companies annually.

MBF Bioscience was one of 18 companies across the United States to receive the Tibbetts Award on May 10, honoring “outstanding small businesses and individuals who participate in the SBA’s Small Business Innovation Research program.” Recipients were selected based on the economic impact of their technological innovations, and whether they met federal research and development needs.

Glaser, the company’s president and co-founder, sat down with the Burlington Free Press last week to talk about the award, and about innovation. He was joined by staff scientist Susan Tappan and marketing manager Kristin Connors.

Burlington Free Press: What exactly do you do?

Kristin Connors: We develop software, and we develop microscope systems for bioscience researchers. But what that means is we have researchers looking at the brain to get data they need from tissue specimens. They need to analyze it. We provide software and tools to do that analysis.

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Jack Glaser: We take microscope images and allow people to enhance the image, measure what they see, count brain cells, count pancreas cells, which is going to be tied in with diabetes. Diabetes occurs because you don’t have enough insulin or sometimes too much insulin, and that comes out of your pancreas.

Susan Tappan: In a real broad sense, we make quantitative tools. If you want to be able to understand a disease, or even normal development, you need to understand how the cells are structured together. How many of them are there? How big is a sub-region? Our software makes it possible for you as a researcher to look at those questions and many other questions.

Also, you can compare results with other researchers, because you’re collecting data in a way that is comparable. Through our conversations with customers, we learn where they want to go and try to anticipate that. How can we make it easier and more robust, not just for what they want to do, but to anticipate where they might want to go in two years.

BFP: What role has federal funding played for MBF Bioscience?

JG: It has played a major role, because we have a pretty small market. It’s international, but really targeted to medical researchers. What that means is it takes a lot of time to develop a sophisticated product, then to have a small market means most companies wouldn’t take the risk unless they felt it was important for another reason.

We do it because it’s important for people to learn about the brain so we can cure Alzheimer’s and autism. We couldn’t do what we do without some kind of support from the government, because it’s so costly to develop the software and instrumentation we develop.

BFP: How did the company get started?

JG: My father and I founded the company in 1987. I was a lot younger. I’m 51. I was 24 or something. My father was a researcher, and he was an inventor. He was one of the first people to connect a computer and a microscope. He did it back in the ’60s. He was a pioneer in the field in the days when computers were the size of a table, first at Johns Hopkins, then at the University of Maryland.

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We started the company because PCs were invented. I was a computer programmer and started working on software to hook up a PC to a microscope.

BFP: Is your father still involved in the company?

JG: He’s a little older now. He was going to come today, but his flight was canceled. We still talk about it all the time. My father is 86. He’s down in Baltimore. He has been in Baltimore for his entire career.

I moved up to Vermont. We started the company together, and there was an office in the basement in Baltimore and in my bedroom in Vermont. We needed to rent office space and picked Vermont because I didn’t want to go back to Baltimore. I came here to go to college.

BFP: Where does your federal funding come from?

ST: Through the National Institutes of Health. One of the reasons we like the NIH is because not only is it medically relevant, which is our area of focus, but we have a lot of flexibility. We’re not only providing solutions for problems they’re requesting. If we have a good idea, we can offer it to them.

JG: Say there’s a particular problem they want people to solve; traumatic brain injury is a really big interest. We’re working on that. They identify problems that are of national importance and fund research in big companies, pharma companies and universities. Then we help.

As a small business, we’re able to do things that are quite innovative, because we’re smaller. We don’t have the bureaucratic overhead. We’re lighter and nimbler. We have really great software people who have worked as a team for a dozen years. We’re able to come up with a solution much faster than a big company would be able to.

BFP: What’s the total federal funding you’ve been able to get?

JG: I would say $10 million, something like that. It’s significant. The other important thing, turn it around and say we got $10 million in funding, yet we generated $100 million in revenue. We were able to leverage that funding by a factor of 10 to 1 and generate a lot of money, which then gets paid back to the government in taxes.

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BFP: What’s your annual revenue?

JG: We’re about $8 million a year.

BFP: What are the obstacles to innovation?

ST: I think one of the things is which direction, which innovative idea should we focus our attention on? Choosing which one will have the biggest payoff, or is a big leap forward.

I’ll use our Biolucida product as an example. We received a SBIR award to create these large images, image montages. We take a bunch of single images and stitch them together for a panorama. Imagine doing that with a microscope slide. It allows you to have a lot of detail in high resolution, but the space covered is huge.

In order to do that, we had to do a lot of research on how to control the microscope to move very precisely to make sure images would line up and then how to properly adjust light levels. All that sort of stuff.

BFP: Is this for the brain?

ST: For the brain. For anything you can put under the microscope. It’s more disease-driven.

JG: It definitely is disease-driven, and to understand disease you have to understand how things work in the first place. So you have to look at how does the pancreas work, and when it’s not working, what’s wrong with it? Are there fewer cells? Too many cells? Too many blood vessels? The body is an amazingly complex organism, and the brain is the most complex organ in the world, and mysterious. It’s probably the most complex thing in nature.

BFP: So Biolucida is a trade name?

ST: It is. We’ve created a product now. What it allows us to do is take these images, which we were originally creating of the brain, and Biolucida allows you to post them on the cloud. It’s not restricted to the brain. You can share your research with researchers all over the world. What that allows researchers to do is expand the usefulness of their data by allowing greater communication.

We’re used to looking at things on a tiny scale. Think of what GPS has done. Now anybody can navigate in New York City. We’re leveraging what we’ve learned about Biolucida for our next grant in the hopper at NIH.

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JG: It’s called BPS, brain positioning system.

BFP: So you’ll know exactly where you are in the brain?

ST: That’s our hope.

JG: Right now, to use Sue’s analogy, if you’re a New Yorker and you’re walking down the street, you know where you are, if it’s a good neighborhood or a bad neighborhood.

ST: But that doesn’t help you navigate San Francisco. We want to make that success, that idea of taking everybody else’s knowledge about their own areas of expertise, and making it accessible to other researchers.

BFP: Where are you on BPS at this point?

JG: We got one grant. We showed it’s feasible to do what we said we would do, to look at a brain and know where you are. We’ve submitted a second application, which is a bigger award. I think a three-year grant so we can actually develop a product. We’re thinking at the end of three years, if we’re successfully funded and we don’t run into any problems, we’ll have this BPS first generation out.

You asked before what are the obstacles to innovation. Sue gave you a good answer. Another obstacle is that some of the stuff we do is really hard. It can be really challenging. We’re going to have our hands full doing this one.

ST: Each animal is an individual, just as each human is an individual. So your brain is different than my brain. This mouse’s brain is different from the next mouse’s brain. So one of the biggest challenges with this grant is figuring out where your visual cortex is compared to mine.

BFP: They’re not the same?

ST: They are when you talk in big terms, but there are individual differences between members of the same group. I think it is going to be an interesting and difficult challenge.

JG: Like a face. Sue has two eyes, a nose and mouth, but my nose is much bigger than hers. You can’t just say, this particular size and spot on the face. A brain is much more complex than that.

ST: That’s an excellent analogy. Our noses are in the same location on the face, but are very different. The brain is the same. It’s a much bigger challenge than GPS, because GPS is looking at a fixed landscape. If we solve the problem, that will open a lot of doors for a lot of people studying traumatic brain injury. Each injury is unique, too. The brain responds differently to an injury due to a blast than an injury due to a car accident.

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BFP: How much is the grant?

ST: Around $2 million. It goes through the first scientific review in June. We won’t know the result for whether or not we’ll get funding until December. That’s another challenge of working with grants. We need to be able to wait to get the money.

JG: The way it works is you come up with an idea, a bunch of people think about the idea, refine it, is it a good idea? An idea that’s not good, we throw it out before we do it. Then we write the grant. That takes a lot of skill and research into the problem and how you might solve it.

Then a bunch of reviewers, experts in the field, will look at this grant, along with many others. They try to pick it apart and find out what’s wrong with it. If they like it they give it a good score. Then it goes on to another bureaucratic system where they rate all the different scores with all the different grants. Everybody with a certain grade will get the money.

There could be good ideas that don’t get a score high enough to be funded. We’ve been in that position. You think you have a great idea, but maybe you didn’t explain it well enough, or the panel didn’t get it. You just have to go on and come up with another idea.